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Jamie DeWolf
Back to Home Back to Show Guests Jamie DeWolf: JAMIE DEWOLF is a performer, filmmaker, teaching artist and vaudevillian showman from Oakland, CA. With a long ranging career began in his teens, Jamie first became known to Bay Area audiences as a performance poet, winning his first slam competition in 1999. Known for his fast paced mix of stand up, theater and hip hop, he went on to become the National Poetry Slam Champion, the Oakland and Berkeley Grand Slam Champion, NPR’s Snap Judgment “Performer of the Year”, and was a featured performer on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, 60 Minutes, UPN and CBS. Awarded “Best Poet” of the Bay Area by the East Bay Express two years in a row, Jamie is also a mentor for Youth Speaks, the nation’s leading presenter of Spoken Word education. He’s performed and lead writing workshops at over 130 universities, high schools and juvenile detention centers across the U.S, and hosted the first-ever slam poetry competition at San Quentin Penitentiary. As a member of The Suicide Kings performance trio (with fellow poets Geoff Trenchard and Rupert Estanislao), Jamie’s toured the country with acts ranging in diversity from Sage Francis, B. Dolan and The Dwarves. The Suicide Kings were the recipients of various grants, from the National Performance Network Creation Commission, the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the City of Oakland to write In Spite of Everything, described by the East Bay Express as “a poignant, chilling, knockout of a play…that beautifully incorporates their visceral verse into the brutal narrative of a school shooting”. The three-man show premiered at the Living Word Festival in 2007 and toured world-wide, performing in such major cities as New York, Washington D.C., and Moscow, Russia. It was listed as one of the “Top Ten Plays of the Year” by East Bay Express, and resulted in the Telly-Award winning short film Ricochet In Reverse, written and directed by DeWolf. A filmmaker since his teens, he has since released his first feature film Smoked which was chosen to premiere at the Oakland Underground Film Festival in 2012 and the PollyGrind Film Festival in Las Vegas the same year, also chosen to be part of the first ever Rio Grind Film Festival in Vancouver, Canada. In addition to music videos, short films and corporate projects for Facebook and Cisco, his proudest achievements are intertwining activism and cinema. He’s helmed national campaigns for the Raise Up Project focusing on the high school drop-out crisis, the Write Home Project which was coupled with a writing program on youth homelessness, and the Off/Page Project in partnership with the Center for Investigative Reporting, coupling hard hitting journalism with performance poetry on subjects as far ranging as housing corruption in Richmond and the abuse of migrant farm workers. In addition he’s shot and directed over 25 award winning films for the Bigger Picture Project, an acclaimed, statewide series of films on Diabetes that have gone viral on UpWorthy, with his performances and films accumulating over 3 million shared views across the world and winning the Spirit of 1848 award from the American Public Health Association. His films have won “Best Cinematography” (Scream 2014), “Best Writing” (Rio Grind 2014), and “Best Acting Performance” (Briefs 2013), and he continues to curate and host the Scream East Bay Express Horror Film Festival and the East Bay’s Briefs Short Film Festival, also teaching high school students documentary and narrative film-making with Lunchbox International. As the host and creator of Tourettes Without Regrets, an acclaimed Bay Area variety show, Jamie was awarded “Best of the Bay” by the SF Guardian and the “Best Underground Cultural Event” by the East Bay Express. The show features a freestyle battle, circus performers, comedians and wild contests. One of the most in-demand hosts in the Bay Area, Jamie is known for his interactive style and games involving the entire audience. In addition to Tourettes (which runs the first Thursday of every month in Oakland, CA), he continues to host events across the country, including festivals such as Symbiosis, Folsom Street Fair and Art and Soul, as well as large-scale circus productions with the Vau de Vire Society. Jamie has also guest hosted a variety of shows, including The Church of Love and Ruin, Red Hots Burlesque, and Cabaret Perilous. The great-grandson of Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard, Jamie is an outspoken critic of the church. He has been interviewed by Inside Edition, the Young Turks, CBS, BBC and NBC. He was the host of the first ever anti Scientology summit in Clearwater, Florida and was a keynote speaker at the first international conference in Dublin, Ireland. His live NPR performance about his lineage entitled “The God and the Man” was awarded Snap Judgment’s “Performance of the Year” and quickly became a viral hit, garnering national press from the Village Voice, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. Jamie is currently working on new screenplays, a one man show and is a producer for NPR’s storytelling show Snap Judgment. He is always looking for new ways to expand as an artist and filmmaker. External Links: * Website * Twitter * Facebook * Youtube